Hitlerland

not object to a book he had written about Woodrow Wilson or any of his other writings. “That book, your work as a liberal and as a scholar, and your study at a German university are the main reasons for my wishing to appoint you. It is a difficult post and you have cultural approaches that would help. I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.”

Dodd quickly called his wife and talked with university officials, but there was little doubt in his mind what his answer would be. Suddenly, he had received an offer to be a participant in history, not just an observer. Besides, as his daughter Martha pointed out later, the call from the president aroused “an almost sentimental nostalgia for the Germany of his youth, the country that had opened up the tremendous cultural horizons to him, softened his heart by the kindness and generosity of its people, both simple and educated.” Dodd had criticized the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty when it had been unpopular to do so, and he had admired the attempt by the Weimar-era politicians to construct a democratic system.

If both Roosevelt and his appointee were inclined to believe that a cultured, liberal, democratic American ambassador might have a salutary effect on relations with Germany, they knew that they couldn’t expect miracles. Over lunch at the White House on June 16, the president discussed trade and financial issues, and then turned to the question of the Jews. “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” he said. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims.”

At the beginning of July, Dodd met with a group of prominent New York Jews, who appealed to him to do what he could to defend their persecuted brethren in Germany. While explaining that he could not intervene officially, he vowed to “exert all possible influence against unjust treatment of German Jews.” But during another call in New York, Dodd received a dramatically different message. Philanthropist Charles R. Crane, who had endowed a chair at the University of Chicago’s history department and also funded the Institute of Current World Affairs, discussed both his hatred of Russia’s Bolsheviks and his admiration for the new regime in Germany, including its treatment of the Jews. “Let Hitler have his way,” Crane advised Dodd.

Little wonder that Dodd boarded the Washington, the ship that would take him, his wife and their grown children Bill and Martha to Hamburg, in a serious mood. He was still excited by this unexpected new opportunity but recognized that Roosevelt’s description of Berlin as “a difficult post” was certainly an understatement. He would have to deal with the Nazis and professional foreign service officers who had a reputation for snobbishness, and he had to try to resurrect his German language skills that had atrophied since his student days. As the ship prepared to depart, a group of New York newspapermen asked Dodd and his family to pose for photos on the front deck. As the new envoy noted sheepishly in his diary, “My wife, son and I yielded reluctantly and, unaware of the similarity of the Hitler salute, then unknown to us, we raised our hands.” The last image of the departing appointee, then, was one of him and his family seemingly mimicking the Nazi salute.

On the voyage over, Dodd practiced his German and insisted that his son Bill and daughter Martha listen to him read aloud so that they would begin to understand the language. He also read Edgar Mowrer’s new book Germany Puts the Clock Back. After taking the train from Hamburg to Berlin on July 13, Dodd immediately found himself answering questions about the kinds of issues that Mowrer wrote about. The Familienblatt, a Hamburg publication, had written that Dodd had come to Germany to speak up for the Jews. At his first briefing at the U.S. Embassy the next day, he told reporters that this was not the case.

Among the reporters present was Mowrer, who came up to greet him afterward. The new envoy told the famous Chicago Daily News correspondent that he had read his book with interest, but didn’t say anything about the fact that it was banned in Germany and that, as he already knew, the Nazis were demanding that Mowrer resign his post as president of the Foreign Press Association.

In the memoir she published a few years later, Lilian Mowrer described the sense of solidarity that blossomed among many of the American and British correspondents who gathered in Berlin late most evenings at Die Taverne, an inexpensive Italian restaurant near the Kurfurstenstrasse, during those early months of Hitler’s rule. “No group of professional men co-operate so easily as foreign correspondents,” she wrote. “Spontaneously in those first awful days, each accepted the common task of telling the world, and for the purpose laid aside any thoughts of personal competition.” Sitting on wooden benches at long tables under low ceilings, the reporters swapped stories, including of desperate late night phone calls or visits from Jews, Catholics, Socialists and others who told terrifying tales of arrests, beatings and torture. In one case, the Mowrers met a recently released Jew who showed them “his back beaten to pulp,” as Edgar recalled.

But if most reporters were increasingly aware of the brutality around them, not all reacted the same way— or certainly not the same way the Mowrers did. When the Nazis had announced the boycott of Jewish stores, Lilian took her American passport and “pushed past these bullies” to shop at Kaufhaus des Westens, a Jewish-owned department store that was almost empty of customers, except for a few other foreigners. Edgar made it a point of visiting a Jewish doctor at the same time to have the cast removed from his leg, the result of an earlier skiing accident. The doctor was so frightened that he only reluctantly entered his own consulting room.

Since the publication of Mowrer’s book, the Nazis had been openly angry at him. A senior press official at the Foreign Ministry suggested that he resign from his post as president of the Foreign Press Association; otherwise, he warned, the government would boycott it. Mowrer turned to Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, a holdover from the pre-Nazi government who routinely tried to assure foreigners of Germany’s good intentions, but received no help. He was as unhappy with Mowrer’s book as were his new masters. Accompanied by Knickerbocker, Mowrer next managed to arrange a meeting with Goebbels, who was equally dismissive. “You claim to have reason to speak with me?” the propaganda chief greeted them.

Unable to stave off a boycott of the Foreign Press Association, Mowrer called a general meeting and offered his resignation. But a large majority of the members voted to refuse his offer, or “to allow social and personal pressure to hinder them in the freedom of their criticism in so far as their work was based on authentic material.” A month later, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced for reporting in 1932, and Mowrer won for “best correspondence from abroad.”

While not changing his mind on the boycott, Goebbels suddenly took a softer line with Mowrer, offering him some journalistic “favors.” He allowed him to join a group of correspondents on a visit to the Sonnenburg concentration camp, with the aim of proving that political prisoners were held in humane conditions. At the time, the early camps of the Nazi regime didn’t have the full range of horrifying associations that they would have later, but stories about brutal treatment were already circulating. Recognizing that they would be given a show tour, Mowrer and Knickerbocker worked out a strategy to find out how one of the most prominent prisoners—Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of a pacifist weekly—was treated. When they asked to see him, Ossietzky was brought out but surrounded by guards. Allowed to ask a few questions, Knickerbocker inquired whether he was able to receive books.

“Certainly,” Ossietzky replied to the satisfaction of the guards.

Knickerbocker asked what kind of books he liked to read, and Ossietzky said: “Whatever you have… history perhaps.”

Mowrer jumped in, asking what period interested him the most. “Ancient, medieval, modern—which do you prefer?”

Ossietzky was silent, then briefly looked him in the eyes as he replied in a monotone voice, “Send me a description of the Middle Ages in Europe.”

As Mowrer recalled later, the two American journalists understood his message all too well, and they watched silently as the prisoner was led “back into Europe’s New Dark Age.”

The AP’s Lochner was also part of the group, but he came to a somewhat different conclusion. After questioning the prisoners, he was convinced that some of them “were indeed badly beaten up, but that apparently all cruel treatment has now stopped,” he wrote in the same letter to his daughter Betty where he had described Hitler’s “Peace Speech.” He was troubled, though, by the lack of charges against the prisoners, and the uncertainty they faced about their fate. “Hence, if the purpose of our visit to Sonnenburg was to convince us that no bodily harm was being done to the prisoners, the purpose was served,” he concluded. “But if the Nazis think that any of us came away enthusiastic over Sonnenburg, they are far mistaken.”

During the visit to the camp, the Nazi officer in charge put on a show of friendliness for the visiting correspondents—and made a special point of singling out Mowrer. “You know, Herr Mowrer, we were very angry